Keeping proportions

Have you ever put a picture on your layout and thought that it would be great to make it bigger? You click on the picture and the little boxes appear around it. You click and drag the corner to enlarge the picture and when you are done, the people in the photo look a bit too skinny and stretched.

There is a very simple technique to keep this from happening. Hold down the shift key while you resize a picture. This works in almost every program I have ever used. When you hold the shift key down and then drag the corner box on a picture, paper, or element in your scrapbooking, it will keep the proportions of that object the same, so that people will look right, circles will stay circles, and clips will still look like clips after they have been resized. Easy isn’t it?!

Shhh… The secret is shadows

One of the faults people often find in digital scrapbooking is that the layouts can look flat without 3D elements attached to them. This, however, does not have to be the case. The easiest way to make your layouts “pop” and look more 3D is to use shadows. Try to picture your layout if it were made with paper scrapping. What things would stick off the page some? Actually everything except the background paper would be a bit raised, just different things to different degrees. The photo might be just a millimeter up off the page if glued, but it might sit higher if attached with photo corners or foam tape. A loosely attached tag might sit even further up off the page. When the light hits a page like this, each paper and element has the potential to create a shadow. Usually it is so small that we don’t consciously notice it. However, we do notice when it is missing from a digital page.

The trick of course is to play around with shadows on your page to make them look natural if you want a realistic looking page. Select papers and elements one at a time and play around with different types and different amounts of shadows. The larger the shadow you add the higher off the page it will look like it is sitting. The other thing to keep in mind is that for a realistic look, all of the shadows should be going in the same direction. If you are planning to keep your layout in digital format, work for the best look on your screen. If you are planning on printing layouts, I recommend trying to print a rough copy at home so you can see what the shadows will look like printed. It will take some time at first to add shadows to many things on your layout, but you will eventually get use to the look you like and it will go much faster. As a word of caution, though, you don’t want to overdo shadows. They don’t have to be on everything on every page and you don’t want them so large that the elements look like they are floating above your page.

Most digital scrapbooking programs have ways to create shadows fairly easily. Here are a few ways in some common programs.

Photoshop Elements: Look on the right side of the screen in the Styles and Effects Pallet. In the left dropdown box select Layer Styles and then in the right box select drop shadows. Click on an element on your layout or click a layer in the layer’s pallet. Then click on the shadow you want added. A little circle will appear to the right of the layer name in the layer’s pallet. If you double click on that circle a box will open with sliders that you can move around until you like the look of the shadow. Take some time to try out some different ones. My favorites for scrapbooking are often the Low and Hard Edge.

Digital Image Pro: Select the item you would like to shadow. Under effects, select the 'shadow' option. A left sidebar will appear along with the option to select the shadow you want to use. I always use the 'soft' option. Below the shadowing options there is a link to 'customize the shadow'. Click that option after selecting your shadow type. A different sidebar opens to the left and allows you to adjust the transparency & edge softness. The default is 88 for transparency & 50 for edge softness. You can also adjust the color of shadow you want to use. I standardly use black. First, slide the transparency bar all the way to the left (0). This will make your shadow very black & easy to see. Next, use the yellow guide dots located all around your object to adjust the size & position of your shadows. Now adjust the transparency from 0 to an acceptable level. At this time you can adjust your edge softness. Standardly I use an option of 60 transparency & 54 edge softness, but this varies based on the type of object & shadowing I wish to achieve. When you are happy with your shadow & settings, click 'Done' at the bottom of the side bar. You will return to the initial sidebar. Click 'Done' again. Your shadows are finished.
(These instructions were graciously written by Angela Fix (matthewsmom))

FxFoto: To add shadows in FxFoto just right click on the object you want to shadow. From the drop menu choose Add Shadow to Image and a shadow will be added. If you don't like it, right click again and click on Add Shadow and it will be removed. This makes in really easy to add the same size shadow to lots of elements like staples or buttons. To adjust the shadow click on Correct and the Info. Now click on the Image Placement and Shadow tab. On the right are slides to control the shadow height, color, darkness and feather. Increasing the feather gives you a soft shadow and decreasing it gives the type of shadow a hard object would cast. Click apply and it will shadow the object you selected. One nice thing - when you move or rotate an object in FxFoto, the shadow changes with the rotation so it is always on the correct side!
(Susan White (seswhite@gmail.com) was kind enough to write these instructions for you.)

To Save You Time When Saving

A lot of the questions at DST I have noticed are about how to save your layouts in different situations. Let me take a couple minutes to explain a few options.

First, while you are still working on a layout or think you might want to come back to change something, it is important to save the layers. I use Photoshop Elements, and the default file type when you go to save there is PSD. This is the photoshop file type that will save exactly what is there without flattening any of the layers. The plus with this file type is that you can always go back and change things. The con is that they are large files and take up a lot of memory space. Since I have tons of space on my computer I still keep the PSD of all of my layouts. It has been especially helpful when I have found a mistake in a layout after I've printed it. Some people use an external hard drive to back up these files, while others will eventually delete them when they are sure they will not make any more changes.

A second option to keep the layers is a layered TIF. I come across these files most in layered templates. They keep the layers and can be opened in programs other than photoshop.

The third type of file type I will talk about is a JPEG. JPEGs keep the colors well and don't take up as much space as a PSD file, but it flattens all of the layers into one. This means that you can't easily separate out any one element on a page if it is saved as a JPEG. I use JPEGs most often in three situations. First, most papers that I use from kits or that I make myself are saved as a full size JPEG. Second, I save things as a JPEG if I want to send the file out to be printed or shared with someone else. Third, I will save my files as a JPEG to post them online. Let me talk about this third way in more detail.

When I am finished with a layout and am ready to save it so that I can post it, here is what I do: First I save it as a PSD file for my own records (full size). Then, I can't immediately save it as a JPEG or the file size will be too big to post online. I go to image -> resize. I make sure that it is in the bicubic mode and change my longest width/height to 5 inches and the psi to 100. This makes an image that is no bigger that 500 pixels across. (This of course can be done in other ways. I know that some people like to make it 7 inches and 72 psi, for example.) Then I save the image as a JPEG and set the quality to 5. I have found this to be an appropriate size to post without the quality getting too bad. Many other people use File -> Save for Web. This is another way to make the file size smaller so that it can be posted.

Finally, I wanted to mention one other file type - a PNG file. You will not often need to use this to save a file as a new digiscrapper, but if you look closely, you will notice that most of the elements or quick pages you use have been saved as a PNG file. These file types keep the transparency. For example, if you have a paperclip on a transparent (see through) background and you save it as a JPEG it will flatten the image and make the background white. A PNG file will keep the paperclip usable with the transparent background.

I hope that this information helped you. I tried to keep things simple, but also give you enough information to work with. If you have further questions, please leave me a comment.

What are layers?

To scrap digitally, you need to know about layers. Have you ever seen those maps in encyclopedias where the bottom map drawn on the paper is, for example, the map of the Americas before the Europeans came over. Then you add a clear page over top that adds the American colonies. Then you could add another clear page that showed the Lousiana purchase or something. As you kept adding layers, you saw the United States growing until a present day map is the finished project. Each layer was mostly clear, but had some color to overlap or increase the size of the US. Well, layers on a scrapbook page are like that. Everything you add to the page is a new layer that is mostly clear except for where the paper, picture, or element is. Let me show you. Each scrapbooking program will look different, but most of them use layers and often show the layers in a layer's pallet. Here is a simple scrapbooking page and the corresponding layer's pallet in PSE:


You will see that each element on the layout is represented separately in the layers pallet. There are 7 layers. The bottom layer is the green background. Then comes two layers for the two strips of paper. Then the picture, the title, the flower, and the tag.

So why work with layers? The simplest reason is that it keeps each element on your layout separate so you can change the size, color, rotation, or anything else of any element without altering the rest of the page. You can also change the layering on the page. For example, I could move the numbered paper strip on top of the pokadot paper strip, by just moving Layer 1 above Layer 2 in the layer's pallet.

As you learn to scrap digitally, you will understand the use of layers better and will come to enjoy them as much as I do!

Credits for the layout: Gretchen Tripp's Inspiration Kit, font: Euphorigenic

Welcome to Digital Scrapbooking!

When I first started digital scrapbooking, I found it a bit confusing but totally addicting. I got most of my help and inspiration from the online digital scrapbooking community that is so helpful and welcoming. Now I want to help those of you who are new to digital scrapbooking. I hope to fill this blog with teachings and tips, inspiring challenges, and information about digital scrapbooking to help you get started.